Sand Artist | Charlene Lanzel is a world-renowned American sand animation artist from New York City, who uses her hands in the sand to create living sand art stories. This is an amazing live performance using sand, a light box and a projector. Charlene creates these fluid story illustrations for large audiences, with an overhead camera instantaneously projecting onto a large screen for audiences in the US and worldwide.

Charlene Lanzel's amazing sand art is created live onstage, where people can watch the artist doing her performance in a darkened room. A video camera is positioned above the illuminated glass table upon which the artist creates sand magic. Sand scattered on her light box is formed and reformed into ever changing shapes and images that tell visually powerful stories.

Charlene Lanzel's sand animation, sometimes known as sand art, sand drawing or sand painting, is beautiful to look at but lasts only in the moment. It is sand storytelling that makes life and time flow by, right in front of your eyes. Sand animation is the most compelling new art form to come around in decades. A popular new trend in performance art, sand art is a form of live sand painting which evolved from earlier sand animation films. Live sand art performances are very dynamic, and require the living presence of the artist to happen. It has quickly become popular all over the World.

A live performance using hands, sand, a light box and a projector.

Watching sand animation come to life, in real time, has an extraordinary effect on the audience. Audience members are uncontrollably drawn into Charlene’s seemingly real world made up of sand characters, trees, mountains and seas. Live sand art is a magical art form that charms. Creating images conjured seemingly effortless, like an oracle or a magician, Charlene's hands skate on glass like a kind of dance. The moving sand creates continuously fluid and poetic figures with original storytelling.

Video performances are shot in one take from memory.

Perhaps what makes sand art so appealing, aside from its beauty, is its fragility and ephemeral nature. It is a practice which uses sand on glass to create a live animated image. Sand is a fluid material and its grains settle by chance, creating living images made of a single texture. Sand art storytelling makes life and time flow by, magically, in front of your eyes.

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Charlene Lanzel's sand performance is choreographed, rehearsed and synched to a special dramatic soundscape, which Charlene creates to enhance the mood. Music accompanies the entire process as the sand artist’s hands follow the rhythm. Her hands move slowly or quickly, as the elegant artwork is created, which challenges and motivates in a captivating way. The audience amazes at the decisiveness in her hands, since the sand artist's hands can always be seen creating in the projection.

Old and young watch and listen together, and all is in harmony, because they all share the same emotions. A visual language is created that transcends linguistic barriers. Drawings are in perpetual transformation which excite imagination, surprise and allow abrupt changes of tone and unexpected images.

Charlene Lanzel performing live in Las Vegas.

Sand Artist | Charlene Lanzel keeps audiences spell-bound by the twists and surprises that follow every sweep of her hands.